Sunday, July 5, 2015

The amount of bombs that were dropped in various parts of Europe during the Second World War was incredible. During the bombing campaigns over Germany and Britain, and in other countries as well, there were a large number of casualties caused by these bombs. During days of the Blitz, when the German Air Force attacked Britain, a single night raid could cause thousands of dead; similarly, the aircraft raids on Berlin and other cities were mass killers, with the most powerful of these raids killing 10,000's of thousands of people in a single night. And this was not the only such event; the movement of the allies from both the east and west into Germany to defeat the Nazis were incredibly violent actions, and the amount of bombs used were massive.
These bombs did a lot of damage then, but many of them remained unexploded, and still cause a nuisance now and then. They would burrow down into the ground, and would remain there, a threat to the whole area around them for hundreds of yards, liable to go off if some kind of disturbance caused them to trigger. In many cases, with digging of areas for buildings or other such kind of construction, these bombs would be exposed and all work would stop until the bomb had been retrieved and then only the work would resume. The threat of such bombs is exposed in events such as these (link to article):

A second world war bomb exploded in a western German town on Friday, killing the driver of an excavator and wounding 13 other people, police have said.
The explosion happened in an industrial area of Euskirchen, near Bonn, at a property used by a construction firm to sort and dispose of rubble. It wasn't immediately clear whether the explosives had long been buried in the ground or had inadvertently been brought to the site in a delivery of demolition waste.
The driver of the mechanical digger was fatally injured after it hit the device, and two people nearby were seriously hurt. Another 11 people who were in the area suffered minor injuries.
Windows, roofs and doors up to 400 metres away were damaged in the blast, police said.